Ever since we got shut out of the Garden of Eden, Jews and Christians have been trying to figure out what the subsequent "Fall of Man" in Genesis actually meant. And means. Now in 2009, could major league baseball have something to say on the matter...?
Here's the deal. Theologically speaking, we are both rationality and animality. Reason and will. Head and heart. While Adam and Eve didn't play baseball, we are lead to understand their rationality was always in perfect control of their animality. Good planning. Until that zero-fun serpent messed them up. By getting them tossed out of Paradise, it left them (and us) without this perfect rational control of our animal selves.
Until, that is, modern science came along a few hundred years ago to put human reason back on the throne. How? Modern science has brilliantly found ways to rationally splice and dice data into irrefutable formulas and cures and inventions. The human reason Adam and Eve screwed up, modern science has brought back. Bigger, bolder and more confidently than ever.
Now baseball is pushing the envelope to an astounding new frontier. The New York Times reports, "A new camera and software system in its final testing phases will record the exact speed and location of the ball and every player on the field, allowing the most digitzed of sports to be overrun anew by hundreds of innovative statistics that will rate players more accurately, perhaps altering forever how the game itself is played."
Talk about our rationality in complete charge of our animality...! Attention fans, when MLB gets through, your game and your players will be so scientifically re-packaged, even Adam, Eve, and the snake would be impressed.
Not exactly what the God of Genesis meant by mind over matter. Or what guys like Ruth and DiMaggio meant by baseball. But there it is fans. Well, except devoted Cub fans whose minds haven't mattered for 100 years!
Saturday, July 11, 2009
Friday, July 10, 2009
WHAT'S NEW UNDER THE SUN
Here's something everyone can agree on. We have more human communication networks going for us since our first grunts and drums. Trouble is, most of the time we're not communicating anything new....!
When you think about it, maybe that's because they're right when they say: There's nothing new under the sun. I'm not sure who "they" are, but it seems they got it right. From cave dweller to astronaut, we're still communicating the very same fundamentals that go with being human -- Help! Look at me! Love me! Stop doing that to me! Here's an idea! Lets try it! Lets try it again!
For those of mighty libraries and even mightier degrees, this may sound foolishly basic. But, then, isn't our human species rather foolishly basic? Dressed in skins or gowns, young and eager or old and cautious, we humanoids haven't changed all that much over the eons. In case you forgot, it's called the Human Condition.
Religions seek to explain it, artists try to capture it, governments work to control it. And yet when it comes to all the important moments in our lives, little or large, our lives have been cloned by cosmic -- or comic? -- forces that simply can't be ignored. To prove this well-worn postulate, check any scrap of evidence at hand. Your daily news reports...your tax returns...your personal letters...your favorite novels...your last wake. Candor and courage impel us to grant this embarrassing yet energizing truth. They're all pretty much the same in our life as in every other life that's ever been or ever will be lived. Be those the lives we know and love, or those we read and study.
Which surprisingly means that meeting Caesar, Charlemagne, Joan of Arc or Albert Einstein in a weekend supermarket line, we'd be able to hold a conversation. Really!
To be perfectly frank, this thought is hardly original. Poets and people, heroes and harebrains, have been saying pretty much the same thing ever since they've clocked enough years to figure out that it's astoundingly true...
....there's nothing really new under the sun, including the sun itself. Which quite properly calls for a soulful: Amen!
When you think about it, maybe that's because they're right when they say: There's nothing new under the sun. I'm not sure who "they" are, but it seems they got it right. From cave dweller to astronaut, we're still communicating the very same fundamentals that go with being human -- Help! Look at me! Love me! Stop doing that to me! Here's an idea! Lets try it! Lets try it again!
For those of mighty libraries and even mightier degrees, this may sound foolishly basic. But, then, isn't our human species rather foolishly basic? Dressed in skins or gowns, young and eager or old and cautious, we humanoids haven't changed all that much over the eons. In case you forgot, it's called the Human Condition.
Religions seek to explain it, artists try to capture it, governments work to control it. And yet when it comes to all the important moments in our lives, little or large, our lives have been cloned by cosmic -- or comic? -- forces that simply can't be ignored. To prove this well-worn postulate, check any scrap of evidence at hand. Your daily news reports...your tax returns...your personal letters...your favorite novels...your last wake. Candor and courage impel us to grant this embarrassing yet energizing truth. They're all pretty much the same in our life as in every other life that's ever been or ever will be lived. Be those the lives we know and love, or those we read and study.
Which surprisingly means that meeting Caesar, Charlemagne, Joan of Arc or Albert Einstein in a weekend supermarket line, we'd be able to hold a conversation. Really!
To be perfectly frank, this thought is hardly original. Poets and people, heroes and harebrains, have been saying pretty much the same thing ever since they've clocked enough years to figure out that it's astoundingly true...
....there's nothing really new under the sun, including the sun itself. Which quite properly calls for a soulful: Amen!
NEITHER LYING NOR TELLING THE TRUTH
Neither the Mayor nor the Sun Times is lying. They're just not telling the truth in July 10's editorial. The quibble over the achievement scores of our city schools (Daley - 69.8% vs ST -- 67.5%) is not the bottom line issue here. And everyone knows it...!
Every teacher and every school administrator knows the real numbers where it all starts. With the numbers of kids coming to class from uneducated homes. Just in case you're a few generations behind the times, folks, here's classroom rule #1. Educators can't really educate kids from uneducated homes!
Do you want an exact number of these homes? Exactly too many.
Those of us who've spent a career in the classroom will tell you the truth everyone's looking for, but won't publish. When you send us kids from a broken home, a fighting home, a jobless home, a drugged home or a ganged home -- don't figure us to turn around your job. We'll try, but you have to try just as hard.
Now if the two of us ever get on the same page, neither the Mayor nor the Sun Times will have nearly as much to quibble about. Because if we do, this could be the beginning of a beautiful relationship!
Every teacher and every school administrator knows the real numbers where it all starts. With the numbers of kids coming to class from uneducated homes. Just in case you're a few generations behind the times, folks, here's classroom rule #1. Educators can't really educate kids from uneducated homes!
Do you want an exact number of these homes? Exactly too many.
Those of us who've spent a career in the classroom will tell you the truth everyone's looking for, but won't publish. When you send us kids from a broken home, a fighting home, a jobless home, a drugged home or a ganged home -- don't figure us to turn around your job. We'll try, but you have to try just as hard.
Now if the two of us ever get on the same page, neither the Mayor nor the Sun Times will have nearly as much to quibble about. Because if we do, this could be the beginning of a beautiful relationship!
Thursday, July 9, 2009
THE LOST ART OF WAITING
There's something about speed in our culture. We love it more and more, faster and faster. Speed is good. Slow is bad. But there's another side to this clock and to this story that unfolds right here in Chicago every day...!
Getting things done fast has its obvious advantages. In business, government, media. What's more we have every conceivable instrument by which to do so. E-mails, Iphones, texting, twittering and whatever new nanosecond widget they come up with. On the other and slower hand, poets and philosophers are always talking about the gift of time. Good point. So lets put an even finer point on it. The gift of waiting.
Today's fast-tracking, instant-gratification Chicagoans are supposedly in a 24/7 state of fulfillment. Whatever we want, we get. Stock reports, business data, weather and sport updates, answers to questions, questions for answers, a perpetual Facebook-Society in which there's no waiting for anything. But wait here with me for a moment....
Neuroscientists remind us our brains aren't designed to function anywhere near as fast as our technologies. That suggest a reason. God and/or Evolution did this for a purpose. Psychology 101 in any college in town can provide the fast-moving movers-and-shakers in town with an answer -- waiting time is not wasted time!
Just as in the world of Yellowstone important things are quietly happening in-between the big geysers and fires, so is it in the busy world of Chicago. Especially in the busy world of our minds. While unnoticed bubblings and seedlings help make Yellowstone what it is, small pauses and reflections help make us what we are.
Waiting for an important personal letter...waiting for the results to a test or an interview....waiting for the answer to our love...waiting for an answer to our prayer. These ticks of time are hardly wasted time. Hopes, doubts, reassessments, corrections are being processed. The space between A and B, the ticks between now and then, these are all misty lands the mind travels in ways we may not quite understand. And yet traveling them -- taking the time to travel them -- is what helps determine our destinations. Be they the answers to our questions or our questions to the answers.
Maybe, Chicago, it all comes down to what the few farmers still left in our state tend to say.about the crops they're waiting for. What will be will be. In the meantime -- in the waiting time -- there are important things to do. Just don't rush me!
Getting things done fast has its obvious advantages. In business, government, media. What's more we have every conceivable instrument by which to do so. E-mails, Iphones, texting, twittering and whatever new nanosecond widget they come up with. On the other and slower hand, poets and philosophers are always talking about the gift of time. Good point. So lets put an even finer point on it. The gift of waiting.
Today's fast-tracking, instant-gratification Chicagoans are supposedly in a 24/7 state of fulfillment. Whatever we want, we get. Stock reports, business data, weather and sport updates, answers to questions, questions for answers, a perpetual Facebook-Society in which there's no waiting for anything. But wait here with me for a moment....
Neuroscientists remind us our brains aren't designed to function anywhere near as fast as our technologies. That suggest a reason. God and/or Evolution did this for a purpose. Psychology 101 in any college in town can provide the fast-moving movers-and-shakers in town with an answer -- waiting time is not wasted time!
Just as in the world of Yellowstone important things are quietly happening in-between the big geysers and fires, so is it in the busy world of Chicago. Especially in the busy world of our minds. While unnoticed bubblings and seedlings help make Yellowstone what it is, small pauses and reflections help make us what we are.
Waiting for an important personal letter...waiting for the results to a test or an interview....waiting for the answer to our love...waiting for an answer to our prayer. These ticks of time are hardly wasted time. Hopes, doubts, reassessments, corrections are being processed. The space between A and B, the ticks between now and then, these are all misty lands the mind travels in ways we may not quite understand. And yet traveling them -- taking the time to travel them -- is what helps determine our destinations. Be they the answers to our questions or our questions to the answers.
Maybe, Chicago, it all comes down to what the few farmers still left in our state tend to say.about the crops they're waiting for. What will be will be. In the meantime -- in the waiting time -- there are important things to do. Just don't rush me!
DIFFERENT NEEDLES FOR DIFFERENT NEEDS
In reporting Michael Jackson's body was "riddled with needle marks"(July 9), you help distinguish the four different classes of enhancement-users in our society: celebrities, athletes, national politicians, and of course Illinois politicians.
Show business celebrities are in and out of rehab because of drug abuse. It's almost a given that big-ticket performers fall back on big-drug habits to keep them going. Star athletes are being caught season after season sneaking locker-room juice to keep them playing. National politicians are being discovered time and time again getting high on sexual dalliances from local hookers to South American beauties.
But here in Illinois our guys (and mostly it is the guys!) are usually hooked on highs you can't get in a shot or locate in a bedroom. In Illinois our guys have been getting high on the most seductive drug of them all -- power! Check the history books and the stories jump out at you like a bad novel.
Inspectors, ward heelers, council member, mayors, state officials and of course governors. No dope for them -- not when there's power to be had. The power to cheat, bilk and corrupt with dazzling indifference to the rules they've been elected to uphold. Hey, in Illinois power is always the needle of choice....!
Show business celebrities are in and out of rehab because of drug abuse. It's almost a given that big-ticket performers fall back on big-drug habits to keep them going. Star athletes are being caught season after season sneaking locker-room juice to keep them playing. National politicians are being discovered time and time again getting high on sexual dalliances from local hookers to South American beauties.
But here in Illinois our guys (and mostly it is the guys!) are usually hooked on highs you can't get in a shot or locate in a bedroom. In Illinois our guys have been getting high on the most seductive drug of them all -- power! Check the history books and the stories jump out at you like a bad novel.
Inspectors, ward heelers, council member, mayors, state officials and of course governors. No dope for them -- not when there's power to be had. The power to cheat, bilk and corrupt with dazzling indifference to the rules they've been elected to uphold. Hey, in Illinois power is always the needle of choice....!
Wednesday, July 8, 2009
CAPTURING THE GREATEST CASTLE OF THEM ALL
Novelist Christopher Morley once tried to capture that large phantasmagorical castle in everyone's life that goes by the name Success. He did it with a small but precise army of words: "There is only one real success anyone can achieve -- to be able to spend your life in your very own way."
Instantly the thought yanks you out from the daily din and drone of the world. It sits you firmly down in front of your own mental mirror. True, there is that loud insistent everyday reality outside of you; but inside here is where you think and feel and fear and dream. So very likely it is inside here where you must gather up what you need to capture that castle for yourself.
Everyone assaults the castle ramparts differently. At different ages and stages of their life. The young and the restless marshal battalions of education, cunning and courage to seize the prize. Older ones tend to count more on experience, patience and persistence. The elderly often are content simply to live in the comforting shadows of the castle.
Then there are those among us who choose less direct strategies. Frequently these are found anywhere from monasteries to mountaintops, from driving a cab to roaming a range, from writing the great American novel in some garret to waiting tables between Broadway auditions. These are the individualists, the mavericks, the Thoreaus. They seem to be saying there must be other castles to win other than the ones always portrayed on the picture postcards of American culture.
Perhaps this castle (or castles) is as delusional as the Arthurian tales of noble knights and gleaming round-tables. And yet, if Morley -- and millions of other reflective Morleys throughout history -- is right, the castle we call success is not captured but created. It's soaring towers, solid walls,and interior splendors must be built brick by brick with our own hands. Using our own schematics.
If so, then our castle will hardly look like anyone else's castle. Nor, in contrast to what our celebrity culture commands, will it have to. It will be a shining fortress for one! And, of course, for anyone who sees the same strength and beauty in its mists that we do. "Build it and they will come..." was the theme to a baseball movie fantasy. Maybe that's what Morley -- and those of us who vibrate to his words -- think about Success. It's for each of us to build with whatever small precious brick and mortar we have available to us.
Then throw open the gates to those who may wish to come in, without regretting that others may not....
Instantly the thought yanks you out from the daily din and drone of the world. It sits you firmly down in front of your own mental mirror. True, there is that loud insistent everyday reality outside of you; but inside here is where you think and feel and fear and dream. So very likely it is inside here where you must gather up what you need to capture that castle for yourself.
Everyone assaults the castle ramparts differently. At different ages and stages of their life. The young and the restless marshal battalions of education, cunning and courage to seize the prize. Older ones tend to count more on experience, patience and persistence. The elderly often are content simply to live in the comforting shadows of the castle.
Then there are those among us who choose less direct strategies. Frequently these are found anywhere from monasteries to mountaintops, from driving a cab to roaming a range, from writing the great American novel in some garret to waiting tables between Broadway auditions. These are the individualists, the mavericks, the Thoreaus. They seem to be saying there must be other castles to win other than the ones always portrayed on the picture postcards of American culture.
Perhaps this castle (or castles) is as delusional as the Arthurian tales of noble knights and gleaming round-tables. And yet, if Morley -- and millions of other reflective Morleys throughout history -- is right, the castle we call success is not captured but created. It's soaring towers, solid walls,and interior splendors must be built brick by brick with our own hands. Using our own schematics.
If so, then our castle will hardly look like anyone else's castle. Nor, in contrast to what our celebrity culture commands, will it have to. It will be a shining fortress for one! And, of course, for anyone who sees the same strength and beauty in its mists that we do. "Build it and they will come..." was the theme to a baseball movie fantasy. Maybe that's what Morley -- and those of us who vibrate to his words -- think about Success. It's for each of us to build with whatever small precious brick and mortar we have available to us.
Then throw open the gates to those who may wish to come in, without regretting that others may not....
DIGITAL TV SNAFU NOT SO BAD
The Sun Times reports "digital TV switch not smooth for all." (July 8). But this all depends on how you feel about not being able to receive some of your local channels. Is this a curse or a cheer...?
To answer that question for myself, I took out my calculator and estimated the breakdown of the local programming these TV owners will miss: Talk 32%(anyone from a chef to a comic)....Commercials 26% (anyone pitching anything just so long as they're pretty and they're smiling)...Re-runs 18% (anything the station can pick up on cheap syndication)....News 12% (anything so long as it focuses on Chicago favorites like scandals, gangs and mayhem)...Weather 8% (anyone at the station who can read a script, because no one really knows what the weather is going to be anyway)...Jokes 4% (any of those little anecdotes they can toss out like a life-raft after they've just drowned you in an ocean of bad news).
Are these stats accurate...? Well, my calculator hasn't switched over to digital yet, so I can't be sure. But I'm calculating they're sadly pretty close.
To answer that question for myself, I took out my calculator and estimated the breakdown of the local programming these TV owners will miss: Talk 32%(anyone from a chef to a comic)....Commercials 26% (anyone pitching anything just so long as they're pretty and they're smiling)...Re-runs 18% (anything the station can pick up on cheap syndication)....News 12% (anything so long as it focuses on Chicago favorites like scandals, gangs and mayhem)...Weather 8% (anyone at the station who can read a script, because no one really knows what the weather is going to be anyway)...Jokes 4% (any of those little anecdotes they can toss out like a life-raft after they've just drowned you in an ocean of bad news).
Are these stats accurate...? Well, my calculator hasn't switched over to digital yet, so I can't be sure. But I'm calculating they're sadly pretty close.
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